Posts Tagged ‘Best Practices’

Whether you’re a small, medium or enterprise company using cloud solutions, using secure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a must. A couple weeks ago I shared some survey data showing you the average security and compliance requirements from professionals in the IT industry. The results of the survey clearly shows that security is a forethought for most businesses, but just like the term “cloud”, “security” can be a bit of a buzz word if not given proper context.

When thinking about security and potentially compliance within an IT environment, there are a lot of important items to consider; some of these can be “offloaded” to your provider, but others are your own undertaking completely. Start by asking yourself the following questions:

Who is your “customer”? – Is your customer, your end user? Or is it your internal organization? More than likely, it is both. Do these “customers” require different levels of security? If so, what are they?

What level of security is “acceptable”? – This varies from company to company. Some organizations like healthcare or government must adhere to extremely strict security (and compliance) requirements, while other businesses might have more leeway when it comes to protecting their assets.

Who in your organization is responsible for security? – Is there a particular team that is tasked with not only determining the security requirements, but also maintaining and auditing those requirements and activities over time?

Is physical security required? – Do you need to physically audit and control your environment? Remember, while clouds are highly virtualized or abstracted, the providers are physical entities. Does your cloud environment need to be physically isolated from other cloud environments? (If so, you might want to consider a Hosted Private Cloud)

Does your company have their security best practices carefully documented? – If they do, you should review it with a critical eye to ensure that it reflects changes in technologies.

To the last point above, the most important philosophy for businesses to understand is that security isn’t a destination – it is a process that takes constant iteration and innovation. Regardless what cloud provider you use (or even if you use traditional in-house infrastructure), this mentality is important to maintaining infrastructure security and compliance.